The Bureau talks to Bob Pickard—whistleblower on Beijing’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank—and what he learned about PRC elite capture, global influence, and Hogue Commission evidence.

By Probe International

 I did not join the bank to become a useful idiot.

Bob Pickard, a Canadian national and former global communications chief for the Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, joins investigative journalist Sam Cooper to discuss his decision to leave the AIIB in 2023 in protest over what he alleged was Chinese Communist Party influence.

During his time working for the AIIB, Mr. Pickard came to realize that senior foreign executives like himself had been hired as “window dressing” to conceal the bank’s “true nature”. The reality, he says, is the bank is a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) influence operation aimed at infiltrating elites internationally. He also emphasized the AIIB’s connection to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a key program of the CCP, and the bank’s role in supporting that initiative as an “arm of PRC statecraft.”

Mr. Pickard recounted incidents where he was asked to keep damaging stories out of the media, including one involving the daughter of the bank’s president and her alleged endorsement of the Uyghur forced labor program. He also described how the bank tried to use him to secure a visa for the president’s daughter, as a further example of the expectation he was there to serve the CCP’s interests.

The AIIB often co-finances projects with the World Bank, using the latter’s reputation to shield its own image, said Mr. Pickard. The bank’s financing, he says, aligns with PRC foreign policy and often supports projects in countries that are geopolitically important to Beijing.

Upon leaving the bank, Mr. Pickard shared his experiences with the Canadian government, which led to Canada suspending its government-led operations in the AIIB.

I left the AIIB when I discovered that I wasn’t there to create a campaign of accurate awareness about a misunderstood organization. I was there effectively to mislead people. They wanted someone to mislead people about their true power structure.

Technically, they were supposed to be just like the World Bank or just like the Asia Development Bank, following a global system of compliance. But in the everyday operating structure of the bank, below the threshold of public awareness, I discovered the pervasive influence of Chinese Communist Party influence and control, [as well as] people who are infesting the bank with their designs, their ideas, their way of doing things…. I was seen as a blunt instrument of party propaganda.

Mr. Pickard refers to an “inertia” on the part of governments, compounded by a greed and fear, that prevents “people from being honest with their taxpayers and admitting that they made a mistake and that this organization does not serve the interests of their country.”

As China prepares “at a breakneck pace” for war with Taiwan, in tandem with President Xi’s “bulldozing” agenda over the South China Sea, why, asks Mr. Pickard, is Canada and other western countries “financing a Chinese bank that will lend money to buttress the Beijing power agenda?” A power agenda, he describes, as dedicated to a “total war concept” that seeks to undermine the Western world and its allies “in every way”.

Listen in for the full discussion here at The Bureau.

Further Reading

Brussels’ Global Infrastructure Plan Isn’t Challenging Beijing — It’s Relying on It